


So You Can Imagine the Kind of Stress That I Am Under

by nik_knows_nothing



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Parent-Child Relationship, Slice of Life, Space Dadalorian, post-episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:07:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22163032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nik_knows_nothing/pseuds/nik_knows_nothing
Summary: Taking care of foundlings is part of the Mandalorian code.That doesn't mean it comes naturally.(Or, the Mandalorian struggles with the care and keeping of a baby alien that is older than he is and is also apparently a magical space wizard.)
Relationships: Baby Yoda & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)
Comments: 36
Kudos: 647





	So You Can Imagine the Kind of Stress That I Am Under

Once they leave Nevarro, there are new factors that need to be considered.

Food, supplies, a place to refuel.

The Mandalorian has contacts, of course.

Can't use them all at once, though.

May be some time before the next big payout, and it doesn't do anyone any good to cash in all those favors in the first few weeks.

The Mandalorian looks over at the copilot seat, where the child is asleep, chin tucked into the collar of its robe.

And then there's that to consider, too.

 _Can't go to Foss,_ the Mandalorian thinks. _They'll know about the bounty, same with Reaver and D'wik._

So that narrows the options somewhat.

For starters, what does this child even _eat_?

"Frogs," the Mandalorian says. "At least we know you eat frogs."

He doesn't exactly have an overstock of those laying about the Crest.

So that's not overly helpful. 

_Frogs_. 

Frogs, that means proteins, at least. 

Semi-carnivorous, so most ration packs should be fairly safe, he figures.

So that's something, anyhow.

The child is still sleeping.

It is alive, isn't it?

It ought to be.

The only one who took any damage during the firefight would've been him, and the beskar held up, so he doesn't think the child might've kicked off without him noticing.

Maybe this species just hibernates more often.

How should he know?

He's never seen a creature like the child before.

At first, he'd thought it might be a Lannik, but the coloring is off, and it's too bald, besides.

The Mandalorian reaches over and prods the sleeping child with one finger.

It stirs, but doesn't wake.

 _Well_.

At least it's not dead.

He'll need credits, if he wants to keep ahead of the client, or whatever hunters the client can pay to send after him.

He could always drop in on Ranzar Malk again, see if the old man has any jobs that need running.

_No, that's a bad idea._

That's pretty obviously a bad idea.

He doesn't need the credits _that_ badly, not just yet.

So he'll lay low.

Skip the galaxy until the ship falls off the client's scanners, and then start taking on some bigger jobs.

For now, he just needs to get as far away as possible.

Preferably before the child wakes up.

_The child._

He just stole a whole child from a bunch of former imps, and he could be mistaken, but he doesn't quite remember there being much in The Code about that.

The Mandalorian pushes the Razor Crest faster, jumps to lightspeed _—_ got to make a few jumps, just to throw off any chasers _—_ and the action shifts the broken bones in his wrist, where the bacta patches are still working to knit the break back together.

He grits his teeth against the pain, but he must have made some sort of noise, because the child wakes up.

At least, he assumes it does.

He grits his teeth, glances over his shoulder _—_ and the child is gone.

For a second, he just stares, uncomprehending. 

Then a tiny hand smacks him on the arm, and he almost jumps out of his skin, because where the hell did it even come from?

" _Shavit_ ," he hisses. "This is why they kept you in a floating crib, wasn't it?"

The child just blinks up at him, placid and looking sort of unimpressed.

The Mandalorian remembers the way it stretched out its hand in the desert, after the other bounty hunters, and he feels a superstitious chill go down his spine.

"What are you thinking you're going to do?" he asks, but the child doesn't answer.

If it knows how to speak at all yet, he'll be very surprised. 

Instead, it clambers up onto the dashboard, which takes a lot longer than it would have if it would just hold still and let the Mandalorian pick it up, but apparently it's had enough of being lugged around for the day.

But it manages to get up onto the controls and promptly wrecks half of his preset configurations by dragging its feet over to the Mandalorian's broken arm, little hands still outstretched. 

"Nice," the Mandalorian says, and resets the controls in time to keep them from nose-diving into the Hensur System.

The child reaches its destination and presses its hands over the broken bone.

How does it know, exactly? Can it see the bones beneath the skin, or is it just some extra sense?

The child closes its eyes, concentrating hard.

And the Mandalorian feels his bones shift.

For a second, the pain is as sharp as it was when the bones first cracked, but then he feels them moving, realigning, settling back into place beneath the armor, below his skin.

The Mandalorian moves his wrist, careful and evaluating. 

There is no more pain.

He can no longer hear the click of the broken edges when he tries to move.

 _Huh_ , he thinks.

Out loud, he says, "Huh."

The child steps away from his arm and nearly falls right off the edge of the dashboard.

The Mandalorian catches it just in time, and the child yawns, sleepy and disoriented. 

He remembers how it was in the desert, how the child had passed out for a solid few solar cycles, sleeping like the dead.

Whatever this power is, it must be exhausting, then.

He catches the child, and it hums, drowsy and apparently satisfied, and makes as though it's going to settle in and fall back asleep right there in the crook of his nice-and-no-longer-broken arm.

"No," the Mandalorian says. "No, we're not doing that."

He picks the child up and deposits it back in its previously assigned spot, and when he glances back a few moments later, it is fast asleep once more. 

He should think about finding it a more permanent place to sleep, he supposes.

Keeping it up in the cockpit with him all the time isn't really a practical choice, and infants tend to need nice places to sleep, don't they?

After all, it does seem like they're going to be in this for at least a little while longer.

The Mandalorian eases the ship through a few more speed jumps, and the child sleeps until long after Nevarro's star has faded into some distant nebula.

Somewhere on the edges of the Core systems, the Mandalorian flips the switches to activate the ship's automatic navigation and turns to see that the child is no longer propped up in its seat.

In fact, the child is no longer in the cockpit at all.

The Mandalorian frowns.

Then he thinks, _right, closed ship, kid can't have gone far,_ and pushes himself out of his own chair with a sigh.

The child isn't on the upper level.

He's just finished checking the closet where he keeps the extra bacta patches when there's a clatter from the lower deck, and the Mandalorian feels his blood run cold.

He slides down the ladder, crouches low at the base, keeps low as he rounds the first corner, because the child is still a sentient, and instinct drives an amateur to fire high _—_

The child is not holding a blaster.

The child is holding a grenade.

The Mandalorian swears viciously, and the child holds the blasted thing up in both hands, like it's another damn frog that it scooped up off the desert floor, and coos.

"Put that down," the Mandalorian says.

The child frowns.

Those oversized ears droop, and it turns the grenade over and over, inspecting it.

"Come on," the Mandalorian says. "Just put it down. You don't want to go playing with that, believe me."

The child holds the thing up to one eye.

" _Put it down!_ "

The child jumps, and its eyes are big enough to swallow up half of the little green face.

But it clutches the grenade closer, defensive, and the Mandalorian curses again.

At least the grenade isn't blinking.

That's something, right?

But now the kid looks like it's going to cry, and the Mandalorian kneels a careful distance away, holds his own hands out where the child can see them.

"No _—_ hey, no, it's okay," he says, and if Greef were here, he'd laugh himself blind at the poor attempt to make his voice light. "Just _—_ give that here, yeah?"

The child looks from his hands to his helmet, suspicious. 

He doesn't have much practice at this, hasn't often found himself in the unenviable position of talking down a target, all soft and nonthreatening and useless.

And the child's still clinging to that grenade like it's a stuffed Ewok, for kriff's sake _—_

"You wanna trade?" the Mandalorian asks, finally stumbling sideways into a bolt of inspiration.

The child lowers the grenade just a fraction of an inch. 

He fumbles around on his belt, finds nothing, and settles for unspooling his grappling line, turning the hook over and over so that it catches the sidelights.

The child's ears prick up in reluctant interest.

The Mandalorian holds it out, considers that the trading of one weapon for another isn't overmuch in the way of an improvement, but at least he's never known a grappling hook to explode and take out the back half of a space cruiser, so he'll take what he can get.

"Look," he says, coaxing. "Look, here, why don't you just _—_ hand it here _—_ "

The child looks between the grenade and the grappling hook.

It doesn't drop the grenade, but it looks between the two, and then it stretches out one hand towards the hook.

"Yeah, that's it," the Mandalorian says, as the child takes one careful step closer, and then another. "There you go."

He waits until the child is less than a foot away before he snatches the grenade _—_ the child squeaks, and the Mandalorian feels _something_ tugging at the grenade, something much stronger than the child's creepy little fingers _—a_ nd then the child is holding the grappling hook and studying it with the same wide-eyed fascination, chirping softly in concentration. 

He breathes out.

Then he checks to make sure that the grenade's activation sequence hasn't been engaged, places it carefully back in the footlocker with the other explosives, and lifts the whole chest onto one of the upper shelves that line the weapons bay.

If the child really wants to get at them again, he knows, a few extra lengths won't stop it, but he's hoping it'll at least buy him a few extra seconds to get down here and keeping the little monster from killing them both.

He keeps his grappling line unwound, though, so that the child can still play with the hook even as he runs a quick sweep of the lower deck, looking for anything else that could bring their flight to an abrupt end.

A few more knives have to be stashed alongside the explosives, and there are three extra rounds for his disintegrator that he left in his haste to get back to the client.

Objectively, of course, he is aware that the Razor Crest is hardly the best place to be raising a child of any species.

But his heart is still racing in his ears _—_ he can feel the blood pounding too fast through his veins, like the moment after a blast-out, or the second before he can reach for a weapon _—_

 _Bad analogy,_ he thinks, and wonders if maybe he shouldn't be thinking about getting a lock or something to put on some of the chests.

He can at least reconfigure the biometrics, he supposes, key it in to a height requirement, like they do on some of the parks in the Core.

 _Must be this tall to access potentially spaceship-leveling weaponry,_ he thinks, and surprises himself by coming dangerously close to smiling.

Adrenaline does strange things to a soul, he guesses.

But he really does need to look into those biometrics. 

_Should've had Kuiil look it over when you had the chance_.

The child gurgles something that almost sounds like a laugh, and the Mandalorian looks down to see it sitting on the floor, hopelessly tangled in the grappling line.

He sighs, crouches down beside it, and starts to try and unwind the mess.

"Don't do that, okay?" he asks, even though he knows the child probably doesn't understand him. "You can't be doing that again."

The child tips forward and falls flat on its face with a determined _clunk_.

"Kriffing _hell_ ," says the Mandalorian, and the child rolls over onto its back and laughs.

Somewhere after Sorgan, it occurs to him that he should probably stop swearing.

Mostly, this occurs to him because Cara looks over and says, "You know, you should probably stop swearing."

At the time, the implication is clear _—clean up your language, clean up your act, and you might just fit in on this nowhere planet, with the blue fish things with too many legs and the peaceful village and the widow Omera._

Now, though, he thinks he probably ought to watch what he says just in case the child decides to start talking one of these days.

"Do you know the species?" Omera had asked, late one afternoon when the sun had been slanting through the trees, golden and bittersweet.

He doesn't know the species.

No one knows the species, not him, not Omera, not the thrice-damned client and his spooky pet scientist.

"No," he'd said, and she hadn't asked again.

But fifty years is a long time to be alive _—_ and isn't that just a trip and a half, the little womp rat's older than he is _—_ and it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility that it'll start talking, one of these days.

So even after Sorgan fades into a speck in the black behind them, the Mandalorian glances sideways down at the child, perched on the dashboard like some kind of Twi'lek dancing toy, and wonders if he maybe oughtn't to be watching what he says.

Not that he says a lot, in general.

But still, he figures, it couldn't hurt.

The child is playing with the sphere off the lever, the way it likes to do so much, and the Mandalorian holds out his hand, palm-up, without any real expectation.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the child thinking it over, trying to decide, and its little brow is wrinkled in concentration. 

_Fifty years old._ He'll be dead and gone, and this thing'll be just barely old enough to drink in Coruscant.

The child carefully places the ball in the palm of the Mandalorian's hand.

"Thanks," he says, holds it up between thumb and forefinger. "This is a sphere."

 _Try to get him started on some of his favorite things,_ Omera had said. _A toy, or his favorite food, maybe._

Some of the kids in the village had taken to trying to teach the child the word for _frog_ , but from what the Mandalorian's seen, the child's all embarrassed about eating those now, so maybe that's a lost cause.

He hands the ball back to the child, who takes it and gurgles happily, and then taps his knuckles against the dashboard.

"Ship," he says, and points out the view screen at the light streaming around them. "Stars."

The child looks where he points, but doesn't try to mimic his words, so he shrugs.

"Stars," he says again, and this time, he makes the hand sign for star in Basic, both index fingers jabbing at imaginary spots of light. 

Maybe the child's species doesn't go in much for verbal communication, he figures, and repeats the sign a few more times while the child watches, entranced. 

"Stars," he says one more time, and the child puts the ball down in its lap long enough to mimic the hand motion. "Yeah, there you go."

The child looks around, and then picks up the ball and holds it out in his direction again.

"Ball," the Mandalorian says, and has to think for a second to remember the sign. "That's still a ball."

The child presses its hand against the arm of the pilot's seat, tilts its head to one side and waits. 

"Chair," the Mandalorian says, and taps two fingers on his right hand over two fingers on the left.

 _Chair_ , the child signs back at him. _Chair, chair, chair._

He's not sure how much the child is actually learning _—_ whether it's actually learning to apply the hand motions to the actual concepts of _chair_ and _ball_ and _stars—_ but it seems entertained, at least, and anything that'll keep the child from flipping random switches on the dashboard is a win in his ledger.

The child keeps patting random objects in the cockpit, looking up at him expectantly, and then mimicking the signal while wandering around and looking for the next item to present for identification. 

The Mandalorian gives him the signs for _stars, ball, chair, blaster, food, trash, credits, blanket,_ and _shoe_ before the child finally slaps its clammy little hand onto his own arm and looks up at him, expectant.

There is no sign in Basic for _Mandalorian_.

Under the Empire, many planet names were erased when the occupants became too unruly.

And Mandalore has never been the type of peaceful world that can be silenced by anything less than full annihilation. 

So of course there is no sign for _Mandalorian_.

In his own experience, the armor is the only identification that most sentients need.

But if the child really is absorbing any of this, he ought to come up with some sort of sign, in case they ever get separated.

"Bounty hunter," he says, and repeats the sign until the child begins to mimic it.

He spells out _D-Y-N_ , starts to spell his clan name, and then remembers that it wouldn't do any good, since the number of people who know him by either designation are few and far between. 

_Hunter_ , he signs again, and the child repeats the sign.

"How much of this are you actually getting?" he can't help wondering out loud.

The child blinks up at him and then chirps, a bright, trilling sound that doesn't really answer his question.

"What's my name?" he asks, pointing to himself. "Can you sign my name?"

If the child signs _bounty hunter,_ most cases, people will know who he is.

 _Blanket_ , the child signs. _Blaster_.

"Right, yeah," the Mandalorian says. "Guess that's about what I was expecting."

He makes a mental note to lock the kid in the cockpit next time he leaves the ship, just in case.

But he picks up a data pad when they stop over on Scuril, tries to teach words like _village_ , too, and _house_ and _lake_ and _forest_ and _home_.

He's not really surprised when the child doesn't seem to understand those words any better than the others.

After the prison break, it's not a surprise when the child has trouble sleeping.

Xi'an alone would be enough to scare any creature sleepless, and that was without taking the rest of the crew into account.

Xi'an would have been enough.

The droid would have been enough.

"You're okay, yeah?" the Mandalorian asks, as the X-wings swoop past on their way to visit an old friend. "The droid didn't get you or anything?"

The child turns its hands over, apparently checking to make sure.

The Mandalorian sees again the way that the child had stared at its hands in startled disbelief when he'd blown a hole through the droid's processor unit.

"Hey," he says, and the child blinks up at him, eyes too big. "You didn't kill that rustbucket, okay? I did. That was me, wasn't you."

As always, he's never sure how much the kid actually understands, but it blinks again, and he sighs. 

"You're gonna be okay," he tells it. "Don't think we'll have to worry about them anymore."

 _You broke out_ , he reminds himself. _You know Xi'an could do the same._

Probably _will_ do the same.

But she'll kill the other two first for trying to leave her behind, and at least that's two more he won't have to worry about. 

Either way.

That's a problem for later.

For now, the child's alive, and so is he, and they're neither of them in a cell, so he'll count it as a good day, all things considered.

He unscrews the decoration off the lever, holds it out in the child's direction without even really having to look.

Honestly, he thinks, he's getting pretty alright at this.

"Here," he says. "Remember how to say _ball_? We worked on this, remember? What's the sign for _ball?_ "

 _Blanket_ , the child signs, and clutches the ball in both hands.

"Close enough," the Mandalorian says, and focuses on tracking their path through lightspeed.

When he's got their course set, he figures that that's enough excitement for one night, and hits the switch to turn on the ship's night cycle.

The lights switch to red, and the Mandalorian scoops the child up from off the dashboard, heads back towards the berthing hold.

In retrospect, he probably should have guessed that the child wouldn't want to go back in the same berth.

That was where it'd been when they'd found it, after all, and the Mandalorian feels cold all over again when he remembers the cruel smile that had twisted Mayfeld's face when the doors had hissed open.

Of course the child wouldn't want to sleep there.

But he doesn't realize it right away, just sort of dumps the child down in its usual nest of blankets, tugs one of the blankets up to cover those ridiculous ears, and then heads for the med pack in the back of the hold.

By the time he's finished patching up the cracks in his ribs from that Devaronian _—_ and by all the Corellian saints, what did they _feed_ the scrappers on Devaron? _—_ he's almost too tired to hear the quiet _hiss_ of the child's berth.

Almost.

He finds the child almost immediately, hunkered down behind the baskets the way it was when he'd crashed onto the ship, breathless and terrified _—_

"Hey, come on," the Mandalorian says. "I told you, they're gone. Go to sleep."

He puts the child back in its berth, washes his face and hands, and collapses into his own bunk, hand curled around the vibroblade beneath his pillow that he stole from Xi'an when they both were so much younger.

Not fifteen minutes later, the berth hisses open again. 

From across the hold, he can hear the _pap-pap-pap_ of the child's footsteps, wandering aimlessly.

The Mandalorian sighs.

"Kid," he calls into the darkness. "Go to sleep."

It's been a day.

He aches all over, and the bacta patch is knitting his tired bones back together, but he needs to rest, he can't keep getting up every five minutes.

The footsteps pause for a beat.

Then _—pap-pap-pap—_ they start up again, and the Mandalorian groans aloud and sits up in his bunk.

If he squints, he can just make out the outline of the child, a shadow in the paler darkness of the hold, can see its ears twitching in his direction.

"Go to sleep," he says again, and points in the direction of the berth for good measure. "Go on, go."

The child tilts his head.

The Mandalorian drags a hand over his face.

Dimly, he's aware that he should think about putting his mask back on, but it's so dark and still in the lower holds of the Razor Crest, so dark that he can only barely make out the child's shape in the blinking lights from the upper level. 

Still, the child hesitates.

"I told you," he says again, without any real hope. "I told you, they're gone. That droid isn't coming back."

That much, he knows for certain.

_Pap-pap-pap-pap-pap—_

The child has brought one of its blankets with it from the berth, dragging behind it like a cape.

The resulting silhouette is funny, in a way that the Mandalorian doesn't quite know how to articulate, and he sighs one more time, doesn't reach for his helmet.

"Alright," he says. "Alright, what do you want?"

The child pads closer and lifts its arms.

"No," the Mandalorian says. "Absolutely not."

The child just stands there, arms raised and blanket hanging off its tiny shoulders.

The Mandalorian looks down at it.

When the droid had raised that blaster, the child had just stood there, hadn't even tried to run, just stood there with one hand raised and waited.

If he hadn't been fast enough _—_

"Fine," he says, and picks the child up by the hood of its robe to pull it into the bunk. "Just this once."

The child ends up passing out directly on top of his lungs, not entirely unlike a tooka-cat, which leads to a particularly dangerous moment when he jolts awake from a dream of drowning and almost grabs for the vibroblade beneath his head.

But he doesn't. 

Instead, he rests his hand very carefully on the child's back, feels the rise and fall of each measured breath.

It's so small, this child is.

So fragile.

His hand spans its whole back, if the droid had managed to get off a shot _—_

Maybe they ought to get a droid, the Mandalorian thinks blearily, as the ship races onwards.

One of those mouse droid things that they're so fond of in the Imp holdouts, nothing too humanoid.

But it won't work, if the kid freezes up every time he sees a droid. 

He's just being practical. 

The Mandalorian feels the child breathing in and out, still clutching its blanket like a cape, and he lets the steady weight lull him back to sleep.

They're two days out from Jakku when a solar burst knocks out nav systems for a few hours, and there's nothing they can do except drift. 

The Mandalorian doesn't particularly mind.

It's a strange feeling, this utter weightlessness. 

When he was still part of the guild, there was never time to just sit and float, there was only the next bounty, the next assignment.

And he knows he had it good, knows that Greef Karga could have loaned them out for private details, the way some of the other bosses do with their highest scorers, force them into a protection duty without any real contract end in sight.

But even so, he only ever kept above the crowd the way he did because he was always scrapping, always clawing his way up into the next rank, the next distinction.

He earned every bit of beskar that went into his armor.

But still, it's nice to sit and just drift.

Nowadays, all they do is run, so it's not the worst thing in the world, to have a moment to breathe.

The system is rebooting from the solar flare, and the Mandalorian is well aware that this would take less time if he power cycled it more regularly, but there never seems to be enough time for that, so they're currently sitting pretty at around 27% functionality.

Enough for low-level lights and basic environmental function, but not much flashier than that.

There's a chime, and the Mandalorian glances at the dashboard. 

30%, now.

The Razor Crest is still a little banged up from the last job _—s_ ome no-account gambling den, far from Canto Blight, where he'd had to spend a solid week scrambling to get out from under some jumped-up charges.

The gambling den is closed now.

But there had been the usual drunkards, and the hired guns that the den had brought on as enforcers, and there had been a bit of a run-in with another guild member, and some Chiss card sharp who he's pretty sure had been cheating him all week in order to stall the inevitable firefight.

At any rate, some of the townsfolk hadn't been too sorry to see the place closed down, and so now the Mandalorian and the child have food enough in their hold to last them wherever they're headed next, and more to trade, besides.

 _38%_.

It is not the level of comfort afforded by the guild.

But it is more than acceptable, he supposes.

It'll certainly do for now.

 _42%_.

The child is getting worse at sneaking up on him.

Or maybe he's just getting better at catching it.

The Mandalorian turns around, and the child gives a squeak of surprise, frozen in the doorway.

"Yeah, not so stealthy these days," he tells it. "Try walking on the balls of your feet. Keep the weight on the back leg as long as possible, mutes the sound."

The child just blinks, and then beams up at him and pads across the cockpit to clamber up onto the dashboard. 

_45%_.

Around them, the whole galaxy looks like it's wrapped close around the Razor Crest, and the child's eyes widen, scanning back and forth across the never-ending sky.

Before it left Nevarro, the Mandalorian wonders, how much of space had the child truly seen?

Was Sorgan its first time seeing the water?

How long was it held in the labs?

Fifty years is a long time to live in a Kaminoan study facility.

The child steps on no less than seven switches on its way to press its hands against the glass.

Then it just stares.

_50%._

_60%._

_70%._

The Mandalorian splits a ration bar in half, hands the bigger piece to the child, who takes it without looking and continues to stare, still and unmoving.

Growing up, the Mandalorian had heard legends of the Jedi, legends of the Sith, of the strange power that coursed through their veins, let them tear entire worlds out of orbit.

As a child, it had been easy enough to dismiss _—_ a myth, a child's bedtime tale.

But the Jedi are back.

Even here, on the farthest reaches of space, people whisper of the new Jedi who dresses in black, who killed Vader and the Emperor in one stroke, who brought the whole Imperial fleet crashing down out of the sky.

The Mandalorian isn't sure he believes that, either. 

But he saw the child lift a rampaging mudhorn clear off the ground, saw the way it stretched out a hand towards the droid.

Perhaps it's all true.

Perhaps only some of it is true.

The child stands with its face pressed against the glass, and the Mandalorian watches it, wonders if it sees the same things that he does, or if there's something else he can't see, something greater.

When the child looks out at the galaxy, maybe it sees something more than the dance of the stars, something that he himself could look for a thousand lifetimes and only see in glimpses.

It is what it is.

But it's certainly possible. 

_80%._

_90%._

_100%._

The ship's engines rumble to life, and the Mandalorian leans forward, tugs on the hood of the child's robe to move it out of the way.

"Time to go," he tells it. "Stop blocking the viewscreen."

The child lets him pull it back, and he puts it on the dashboard in front of him for lack of any better options as he punches in the code for their next jump.

The engines ignite on either side, and the Razor Crest comes alive, humming with coiled energy.

For one more second, they are still just drifting.

Just floating. 

The child pats his arm, and he looks down to see it still holding the ration bar, but jabbing two fingers at random points in the sky, eyes still so wide.

It takes a second for the Mandalorian to recognize the sign.

 _Stars_ , the child signs, over and over and over again. _Stars, stars, stars, stars—_

They make their jump.

The lights stretch and then blur into streaks outside the viewscreen, and the child turns back to the front, entranced as always by the sight.

 _Stars_ , it says again. _Stars_.

"Yeah, yeah," the Mandalorian says. "Don't get crumbs on my controls."

The child gurgles happily, leans back against his chest, and holds the ration bar tightly in both hands as the stars stream past outside.


End file.
